Hello, I should probably start up saying that I'm very new to PD, but I'm trying to make a patch that would read a JPG file as text basically outputting the ascii of the said JPG file to the canvas in some way I could manipulate it, and then save it back to a JPG, I just want to recreate the normal glitching processes but in pure data.

The problem:
I do not know how to print the ascii of the jpg file to the canvas it only prints to the console and not all of the information, there is an error at the end:

**error: ** extra characters after close-brace

Any help would be much appreciated, thanks in advance
project jpg.pd

And if you can't get [list fromsymbol] working, then try [moocow/any2bytes]

@Alexandros and @Liamg Thank you for the reply, I have tried your suggestions but rewind seem to be of no avail, doesn't seem to do anything. And I am using the [moocow/any2bytes] instead of [list fromsymbol] as Liamg suggested, but the same error still appears. This might just be my noobness, so I am attaching the updated patch to the message on the hope you may have some time to inspect it and see if I'm doing something incorrectly which is most likely the case.
Thank you againproject jpg.pd

Connect [any2bytes] to a [print] to see its output. Send the message to load an image file to [textfile], then send it the message "rewind" (there's no need to attach a GUI bang to the message, you can click on the message straight away), and then send a bang to [textfile], not to the "rewind" message. You'll start getting the file's contents on Pd's console. Once you have stuff going into [print], you can do anything you want to that data...

@alexandros Thank you very much for your instructions and patient, it does indeed work as you told me, there are a few issues that hopefully you will be able to clarify.

• The byte information that is being printed seems to have no end, is this due it being in byte format and just being that huge, or will it repeat itself from the start if I just keep sending it a bang. Furthermore is there any way to convert the data on the console in ascii code? It is of my interest to keep it in ascii, for my better comprehension and also so that a little alteration of the data would result in a bigger outcome, plus it will be a major part for the artistic side of the project.

• The last one is, can the information being printed on the console be printed on the canvas?

Thank you again for you collaboration, I have been months stuck on theses points.

"The byte information that is being printed seems to have no end, is this due it being in byte format and just being that huge, or will it repeat itself from the start if I just keep sending it a bang. Furthermore is there any way to convert the data on the console in ascii code? It is of my interest to keep it in ascii, for my better comprehension and also so that a little alteration of the data would result in a bigger outcome, plus it will be a major part for the artistic side of the project."

As far as I know, [textfile] outputs one line of text when banged. But I think that lines must be separated with a semi-colon. I tried your patch with a .jpg I had and I got some long and some short lines. I don't really know how the .jpg format is, so I can't really answer this question.
To convert to ASCII use [list fromsymbol] and you'll get the ASCII. You can then manipulate the values as you wish, and send them to [list tosymbol] before you write them to a file using [textfile] (I think this should work...).

"The last one is, can the information being printed on the console be printed on the canvas?"
I told you to use [print] to make sure you get the data out of [textfile]. [print] is for debugging. Since you do get the data, instead of [print] use [list fromsymbol] and send that output to your conversion algorithm...

@alexandros Hello It's been a while, I've been trying to make the patch work on my own, but I still don't get it. When I tell it to output a .bmp ( I switch from jpg to bmp its a simpler file format) file from the [textfile] the .bmp file it outputs has content but I can never open it its to corrupted. This is as far as I got, I tried to add a message to it so it could be a form of glitching it.

Thanks for all the help and instructions so far
me project jpg.pd

@Sarabade Hello Sarabade......
If you google the wikepedia pages for all the different file formats for video and still images you will see that all of the files will have a header, which tells the operating system how to interpret the file (even the uncompressed formats like .bmp). If you glitch (corrupt) the header then the file cannot be read.

So you must not corrupt the data until you are a few (or a few thousand) bytes into the file (how many depends upon the file format...... jpg, tiff, bmp etc..)

I have found Antonio Roberts file on my computer and modded it to send out the ascii codes...... it might provide a start for your project........
JPG - binary - killer_mod.pd
Look into (right-click-open) one of the green abstraction boxes to see how you could write your new file..... and save it......... and importantly how you can avoid modifying the header.......

You cannot use [send glitch_ascii_code_list] as the header codes are already broken!!...... it is just for viewing in the terminal...........

If you try to write the actual ascii "symbols" to a message file then you will get the "closing brace" messages that you are seeing.......or worse! Pd will try to interpret some characters as "control" messages, and that will crash Pd. You will have to work with the numbers that represent the "characters" (ascii or binary) and not the "text" characters....a,b,c, etc......
David.

@whale-av Thank you very much, I will dedicate time to understand the workings of the patch. I've seen this patch before on the hellocatfood blog, but was not able to download a working version of it. o/

You might also want to check out this jpg glitcher by David Schaffer https://github.com/schafferdavid/jpeglitcher

@hellocatfood I've also found Davis Schaffer version before, but for some reason didn't run on my PC also. But thanks to you, @whale-av, @alexandros and everyone that helped on this post, things are going well. Thanks for the information and patience.